Introducing Aardvark: OpenAI’s agentic security researcher

March 6, 2026 Update: Aardvark is now Codex Security, and is available as a research preview.

Aardvark is now built directly into Codex as Codex Security, and is rolling out to ChatGPT Enterprise, Business, and Edu customers via Codex web with free usage for the next month. Please see our blog here.⁠

Today, we’re announcing Aardvark, an agentic security researcher powered by GPT‑5.

Software security is one of the most critical—and challenging—frontiers in technology. Each year, tens of thousands of new vulnerabilities are discovered across enterprise and open-source codebases. Defenders face the daunting tasks of finding and patching vulnerabilities before their adversaries do. At OpenAI, we are working to tip that balance in favor of defenders.

Aardvark represents a breakthrough in AI and security research: an autonomous agent that can help developers and security teams discover and fix security vulnerabilities at scale. Aardvark is now available in private beta to validate and refine its capabilities in the field.

How Aardvark works

Aardvark continuously analyzes source code repositories to identify vulnerabilities, assess exploitability, prioritize severity, and propose targeted patches.

Aardvark works by monitoring commits and changes to codebases, identifying vulnerabilities, how they might be exploited, and proposing fixes. Aardvark does not rely on traditional program analysis techniques like fuzzing or software composition analysis. Instead, it uses LLM-powered reasoning and tool-use to understand code behavior and identify vulnerabilities. Aardvark looks for bugs as a human security researcher might: by reading code, analyzing it, writing and running tests, using tools, and more.

Aardvark relies on a multi-stage pipeline to identify, explain, and fix vulnerabilities:

Real impact, today

In benchmark testing on “golden” repositories, Aardvark identified 92% of known and synthetically-introduced vulnerabilities, demonstrating high recall and real-world effectiveness.